His dearest friends would have held him with them. Not every man's hand was against him--on the contrary, numerous were those, even among the opponents of his political and theological utterances, who hoped that he would not desert them. They regretted that he had--
turned his attention too much from the luminous field of philosophic disquisition to the sterile regions of polemic divinity, and the still more thorny paths of polemic politics....
from which the hope was cherished that he would recede and devote all his might to philosophical pursuits.
A very considerable number ... of enlightened inhabitants, convinced of his integrity as a man, sincerity as a preacher, and superlative merit as a philosopher, were his strenuous advocates and admirers.
But the die had been cast, and to America he sailed on April 8, 1794, in the good ship _Sansom_, Capt. Smith, with a hundred others--his fellow passengers. Whilst on the seas his great protagonist Lavoisier met his death on the scaffold.
Such was the treatment bestowed upon the best of their citizens by two nations which considered themselves as without exception the most civilized and enlightened in the world!
It is quite natural to query how the grand old scientist busied himself on this voyage of eight weeks and a day. The answer is found in his own words:
I read the whole of the Greek Testament, and the Hebrew bible as far as the first Book of Samuel: also Ovid's Metamorphoses, Buchanan's poems, Erasmus' Dialogues, also Peter Pindar's poems, &c.... and to amuse myself I tried the heat of the water at different depths, and made other observations, which suggest various experiments, which I shall prosecute whenever I get my apparatus at liberty.
The Doctor was quite sea-sick, and at times sad, but uplifted when his eyes beheld the proofs of friendship among those he was leaving behind. Thus he must have smiled benignantly on beholding the
elegant Silver Inkstand, with the following inscription, presented ... by three young Gentlemen of the University of Cambridge:
"To Joseph Priestley, LL.D. &c. on his departure into Exile, from a few members of the University of Cambridge, who regret that expression of their Esteem should be occasioned by the ingratitude of their Country."